Behnaz Fattahi....22/01/1392....social bookmarking tools
What is Social Bookmarking?: Complementing the Semantic Web effort, a new breed of so-called “Web 2.0” applications is currently emerging on the Web. These include user-centric publishing and knowledge management platforms like Wikis, Blogs, and social resource sharing tools. These tools, such as Flickr3 or del.icio.us,4 have acquired large numbers of users within less than two years.5 The reason for their immediate success is the fact that no specific skills are needed for participating, and that these tools yield immediate benefit for each individual user (e.g. organizing ones bookmarks in a browser-independent, persistent fashion) without too much overhead. Large numbers of users have created huge amounts of information within a very short period of time. The widespread use of these systems shows clearly that folksonomy-based approaches are able to overcome the knowledge acquisition bottleneck, which was a serious handicap for many knowledgebased systems in the past. Social resource sharing systems all use the same kind of lightweight knowledge representation, called folksonomy. The word “folksonomy” is a blend of the words “taxonomy” and “folk”, and stands for conceptual structures created by the people. What is social bookmarking? It is tagging a website and saving it for later. Instead of saving them to your web browser, you are saving them to the web. And, because your bookmarks are online, you can easily share them with friends. Unlike file sharing, social bookmarking does not save the resources themselves, merely bookmarks that reference them, i.e. a link to the bookmarked page. Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content". What Can Social Bookmarking Do For Me? : Not only can you save your favorite websites and send them to your friends, but you can also look at what other people have found interesting enough to tag. Most social bookmarking sites allow you to browse through the items based on most popular, recently added, or belonging to a certain category like shopping, technology, politics, blogging, news, sports, etc. You can even search through what people have bookmarked by typing in what you are looking for in the search tool. In fact, social bookmarking sites are being used as intelligent search engines. Social bookmarking and social news allow you to specifically target what you want to see. Instead of going into a search engine, typing something in, and then searching for that needle in a haystack, you can quickly narrow down the items to what you are looking for. Social Boolanarking. Bookrnarking sites allow users to do more than just save the Web addresses of interesting content. They allow readers to save and archive entire pages, thus producing a form of a searchable, "personal Interne!." In addition, social bookrnarking sites like Diigo.com and Delicious.com allow teachers and students to build subject-specific resource lists that they can easily share when using RSS. This i n turn creates a community of information gatherers who extend the reach of any one person. there are many of these social bookmarking sites that have been created in the past couple of years. But two, Diigo and Delicious, have come to the forefront of the pack for some very different reasons. Once again, these are both free services that any teacher or student can access on the Web. As with other sites, although the content you'll find here is primarily safe and in good taste, Diigo is a tool that not only allows you to begin constructing your own little piece of the Web, it's a way of organizing it for yourself and for those you are collaborating with. But Diigo also has some unique features that extend our ability to read and write socially in compelling ways. Not only can we bookmark the pages we find interesting, we can actually annotate and highlight them for ourselves or with others. More on that in a minute. The best part about Diigo is that you can use it collaboratively not just to save pages but to annotate important sections and even leave notes on the page for selected others to see. On the DiigoIet toolbar, You'll see the ability to "Highlight" and add "Sticky Notes." You can choose to keep your bookmark private, or you can let other Web surfers know that you saved it as well. In fact, if you want to start connecting to other people who share your interests, Diigo will point you to other folks who have publicly saved the site. On the other hand, Delicious approaches the social bookmarking concept a bit differently. Whereas Diigo is about saving content, Delicious is all about sharing links in as easy a way as possible. Social bookmarking allows users to qualify content. With Delicious, each "bookmark" of a specific webpage is seen as a vote of confidence. The more people who bookmark a specific webpage, the more credible the webpage is viewed. In addition to bookmarking a webpage, users "tag" the webpage. The tags are simply single word keywords that relate to the contents of the webpage. The tagging associates keywords with the webpage's content, making it easier to categorize and classify the content of the webpage. If everyone bookmarking a page uses similar keyword tags, the webpage will be classified as a credible resource in a specific category. As a webpage receives more and more bookmarks from different Delicious users, the listing for the webpage becomes more prominent in the Delicious listings. Delicious users can bookmark and tag multiple pages within a website. Content can be tagged with multiple terms. As more users tag the content, it becomes easier to find similar topics. Flickr Flickr, one of the most well known and widely used of these tools, offers a different kind of service. Flickr is for managing images (specifically digital photos) rather than links per se. But it is so similar in purpose to the other tools that we include it here. Co-founded by Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, it is now run as a commercial operation under the Ludicorp brand .Flickr has the widest user base of all these tools. This, perhaps, is not so surprising because it is built around photos – digital cameras and camera phones being prevalent these days – and there are very strong emotional drivers for sharing images. Flickr hosts users' photos on its own servers so that they are retrievable (in various size samplings) from anywhere over the Web. Flickr provides free user accounts, albeit bandwidth-capped for uploading, and premium paid-for accounts that limit the restrictions that are placed upon users. Photos can be aggregated into photosets and can be made public or private as desired. 4 Great Bookinmarkg Tools for the Web 1. Instapaper Instapaper is one of the most popular bookmarking tools on the web today, and one of the best aspects of it is that it’s versatile enough to use on all your devices including your computer, on your Kindle, on your iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch or even on plain white paper. Simply press the “Read Later” button to come back later and read web pages when you have more time. 2. Xmarks Xmarks is another leading bookmarking tool and works with most popular web browsers including Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari. It actually syncs up all your bookmarks with every browser platform between devices, including mobile phones. They also backup your bookmarks on a daily basis for easy recovery. 3. Pocket Formerly known as Read It Later, Pocket allows you to put almost anything directly from your browser and even from other web apps like Twitter, Email, Flipboard, Pulse and Zite. Pocket is easy to use even for beginners that have never bookmarked a single page in their lives. You don’t need an Internet connection to read stuff stored in Pocket and they can be viewed from a range of devices including tablets and smartphones. 4. Readability Readability turns any web page into a clean and simple page that’s ready for viewing at your convenience on your computer, smartphone or tablet. You can download it for free to your desktop and there are also iOS and Android apps available. Readability does a great job at cleaning up cluttered pages and really helps simplify your reading experience. Resource: Wikipedia "Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms" by Will Richardson Tony Hammond, Timo Hannay, Ben Lund, and Joanna Scott Nature Publishing Group {t.hammond, t.hannay, b.lund, j.scott}@nature.com